When Your Sex Life With Your Partner Dies – 3 Ways Forward
Dr. Sheri Jacobson
March 13, 2023
by Andrea M. Darcy
Is your relationship still alive (or at least dragging along), but your sex life is a desert?
What can you do if your sex life has ground to a halt?
Re-Starting Your Sex Life
Note that the below tools for re-starting your sex life with a long-term partner assume the following.
1.) You have both taken the time to make sure the problem isn’t physical.
Things like heart disease, an underactive thyroid, pregnancy, menopause, and taking new medications including contraception can all cause your sex drive to plummet. If any of these are a possibility, do talk to your GP.
2) You did have a good sex life, but now it’s vanished.
If you feel you have never had a good sexual relationship with your partner, the below advice might help. But also read our articles on different libidos, having a low sex drive / having a high sex drive, and what a healthy sex life actually looks like.
1. Start with a trust inventory.
By: Stefany
Why is it some couples stay together after a betrayal or challenging life change, and others don’t?
Beneath the various reasons (our children, our life together, etc) it’s inevitably down to trust.
If there is still even a spark of trust left after a divisive experience, there is a greater chance the partnership can survive.
How does this relate to your sex life? Most people’s libidos are affected by trust (yes, even men’s). The more they trust, the more free they feel to be physical. If they don’t trust, they shut down, and sex becomes mechanical or non-existent. Grow the trust, and the attraction returns.
Putting your attention on how much trust exists in your relationship is a habit of attention that can grow the trust you already have.
Make a list of all the ways you still share trust, no matter how small. Do you trust them to pick you up from work? Be on time for dinner? Be a good parent?
Try to focus on three moments you trust your partner each day. You might find you trust them in bigger ways, too. You trust them to keep your secrets and be on your side at family reunions, for example.
[And if you discover you don’t trust them at all? It might be time to move on. Read our article on ‘Why I Can’t Leave a Relationship When I know I Should‘].
2. Spend quality time alone.
Convinced your partner doesn’t notice or want you any more? It is worth honestly asking yourself – do I notice and want myself these days?
Spending time alone might sound counterintuitive to helping your sex life, but note we’re talking about quality time alone here. This is time spend getting back in touch with yourself, and what lights you up. If you are honest with yourself, what makes you feel totally alive inside?
Whether it’s hobbies you’ve lost sight of in your relationship, or trying the ones you’ve always wanted to but your partner doesn’t, or starting that project you’ve put off for years? Doing things for yourself leads to raised self-esteem, which is extremely attractive to all those around us.
Re-connecting to your creative thinking also puts an end to any cycles of drama in your relationship that were unconsciously being used to avoid boredom (and yes, a war over different sex drives or no sex life can sometimes be just that).
Still not convinced? Creativity (and that doesn’t have to be art, it can be anything that gets you into a ‘zone’ or thinking differently) has been linked by a research study to sexual success.
What if spending time alone means you discover you don’t like yourself, don’t even know who you are or don’t know what you want, or that your self-esteem is at rock bottom? Then some of that time might be best spent not totally alone, but with a therapist. No relationship can go well if you are using it to hide your issues with.
It’s especially important that you see a counsellor or therapist if you suspect you are suffering from too much stress, anxiety, or depression. All three conditions can negatively affect your libido. Seeking support might not only save your sex life and partnership, it will help with other areas of life like your career and your family life.
3. Go connection crazy.
By: sprout_creative
Many articles on helping a dead sex life will give you a list of ways you can ‘spice up’ your sex life or ‘experiment’. Or they tell you to ‘start communicating more‘. They will encourage you to book ‘date nights’ together.
These common tips are actually all about the same thing. They are about forming a new sense of connection with your partner through shared experience and openness.
For example, even if the sex experiments are an utter disaster, the laughter and shared memory form a sense of connection that might have long been missing between you.
Connection, daring to be vulnerable and expose your authentic self, is a crucial ingredient of intimacy (and good sex). Long-term partnership can leave us in entrenched patterns that mean we’ve actually long stopped connecting and are instead making assumptions about how well we know the other.
Not sure if you are or aren’t connecting? Ask yourself questions such as:
- How much do you really share with each other these days?
- Do you tell him or her when you are upset about something, or are they the last to know?
- How often do you turn to your partner and let him or her help you?
- Do you talk about your hopes and dreams, or just about schedules and kids?
- Do they know your shadow side, or do you try to hide it from them?
- Do you let them see you be vulnerable and afraid, or hide it all behind conflict?
In an era of self-improvement, it’s not hard to find books and workshops on communication and authentic connection. If you feel you need help with connection, try the next tip.
Talk to a couples counsellor
Any ideas you have that a couples counsellor will tell you what to do, or favour one of you over the other, are therapy cliches from TV shows and not reality.
A couples therapist is there to help you find your own answers, and they do so by helping you clearly communicate and connect. A problematic sex life is one of the most common reasons couples seek therapy, so there is absolutely no need to feel embarrassed, either.
Harley Therapy connects you with couples counsellors in three London locations. Did you also know that you can have online counselling?
Andrea M. Darcy is a mental health and wellbeing expert and personal development teacher with training in person-centred counselling and coaching. She is also a popular psychology writer who often writes about relationships! Follow her on Instagram for useful life tips @am_darcy
Thinking about leaving partner. Work away a lot, earn lots, shecwants forvnithing, Jeep myself in shape. I’m lucky to get Sec 2x per month, never strayed but serious contemplating it. She told me she can’t be bothered anymore
Hi Charlie, that’s a hard one. The thing is, often there is a crossed wires with men/women. For men it’s just a physical urge. Women often need to feel secure to have sex. So if all your travelling is leaving her at all feeling insecure….? Or if she doesn’t realise or understand your physical desire…..? We’d say go back to when you first met. Was there attraction, was it working then? Do you share values? Do you trust and respect each other? If so, then before you throw in the towel consider a few sessions of couples counselling, just in case some help at communicating could not only bring the spice back, but get the relationship better than ever. Otherwise, it would at least help with a good over angry breakup! And if you are here looking it up, we imagine something inside of you might be doubting if there’s something worth saving? Good luck!
My and my husband are married not even been a year yet nearly wanted to divorce him 3 times we used to have a good sexlife new and exciting but now it just feels like a chore there is no trust between us as little as he thought I wanted to sleep with his brother! Of all people when it comes to rows there’s no middle ground it’s you did this you did that the sky’s blue he argues it gray I’m at my whits end of it all!!
Hi Denise, sounds tough. Although it also sounds a bit like you are blaming him completely here, is that possible? In relationships it’s 50/50 whether we want to see it or not. If the communication has broken down to this level, we would of course suggest couples counselling, because we know it works. If not, then you are of course free to decide to stay or leave.
With my partner 13 years and it’s been nearly a year since we had sex. Intimacy is gone. I wake up every morning annoyed that we’ve turned in nothing more than housemates. I’ve spoken to him endless times over it. He won’t go to counselling. I feel trapped and I’m afraid to end the relationship because I don’t want to hurt anyone but I know I’m not happy
Hi Patricia, this is tough and also a common problem. We wonder about the way you are communicating to him. You say you are annoyed. Does that come across in the way you tell him you miss the sex? Does he feel you are trying to bully him into counselling? Or have you approached it in a calm, open, supportive way, letting him know you appreciate the relationship and him and why, using positive communication skills such as never starting sentences with ‘you did/you said’? These are all the kinds of things couples counselling helps with. But you can also learn by yourself. If he is still in the relationship he must want to be there. It might be something totally different than you expect that is holding him back. Or even medical. Men can have hormone changes, too. We’d also say that if he doesn’t want to go to therapy, you can go yourself. Either you’ll figure out what you really want and how to make the steps you want forward, or you’ll end up feeling so good about yourself he’ll be tempted to go himself… we can’t change someone else, but we can change our steps in the dance, and sometimes that triggers interesting things. Best, HT
The sheer amount of cliches in this article and especially the reply to Charlie are a joke!
Being women you are desperate to avoid conflict of any sort. Your industry is now dominated by female psychologists with feminist leanings.
You deliberately try to exculpate women for their manifest relationship failings. Typically risible lines like “help her to relax”, “do more housework”, “build erotic tension throughout the day”, “romance her 24 hrs” and on and on….
Why do men have to take responsibility for a woman’s inability to control her emotions and stress levels?!
The blame for relationship failures and non existent sex lives need to be squarely aimed at women: you want careers and families, yet you are incapable as a group to manage them. Antidepressant prescriptions are off the charts – further damaging your own libidos.
What a disaster, especially for children. Seems like the experiment from the 70s of giving you careers is an utter failure. You’re incapable of managing the stress involved.